Sen. Chuck Grassley, in a speech on the Senate floor, maintained that the confirmation process for Judge Brett Kavanaugh has been the “most transparent confirmation process in history.”

Grassley’s evidence for this grand statement is the sheer volume of records that the Judiciary Committee may review during its confirmation process.

“We have already received more documents from Judge Kavanaugh’s Executive Branch service than any nominee in history, with many more to come,” Grassley said Wednesday. “In fact, for Judge Kavanaugh, we could receive up to 1 million pages — which is more than the five prior Supreme Court nominees combined.”

Indeed, the National Archives general counsel, in a letter to Grassley, said the total volume of records the archives reviewed for the nomination of Justice John Roberts was about 70,000 pages. For Justice Elena Kagan, it was about 170,000 pages. The total the archives processed for the past five nominees was less than a third of the number of pages requested for Kavanaugh.

What Grassley is glossing over, however, is that Kavanaugh’s judicial and political career apparently has generated an unusually high mountain of documents — and Grassley intends to make only a fraction of them available to the committee.

It reminds me of the kind of math that former Gov. Terry Branstad liked to do on the campaign trail. He would take credit for the tens of thousands of jobs created during his time in office — without acknowledging how many jobs were lost during the same period. It’s misleading to talk only about jobs created when what’s really important for Iowans is the net number of new jobs.

It’s similarly misleading for Grassley to talk about transparency in terms of the number of records requested without considering the volume of records that some senators and members of the public might want to review but can’t.

What Democrats are particularly upset about is Grassley’s refusal to request any of the roughly 1 million documents from Kavanaugh’s three years as staff secretary in George W. Bush’s White House from 2003 to 2006. During that time, Kavanaugh may have had a role in numerous controversial issues.

"Documents from his time as staff secretary are critical to understanding his knowledge of and involvement with torture, warrantless wiretapping and the use of (presidential) signing statements, to name just a few key issues," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, according to USA Today. "Republicans are claiming that Kavanaugh was nothing more than a paper pusher who told President Bush what was for lunch. That’s false, not to mention ridiculous."

Furthermore, Democrats argue, the fraction of records the committee will receive will have first been vetted by an ally and former co-worker of Kavanaugh’s. William Burck is leading a team of lawyers on behalf of former President Bush to review documents that can be withheld for executive privilege. Democrats point to his former job as deputy staff secretary under Kavanaugh as a conflict of interest. Grassley did not request a privilege log so that committee members can see which and how many documents were withheld.

Grassley has alternatively downplayed the importance of the staff secretary position and accused Democrats of simply trying to stall the confirmation vote until after the midterm elections. The first is easily rebutted by Kavanaugh himself. He has more than once cited his time as staff secretary as particularly formative and instructive among legal experiences that he finds useful as a judge.

Grassley’s no doubt correct about the second part — that Democrats would like to delay a vote on Kavanaugh until after the midterm elections. Any seats flipped from red to blue will make it harder for Republicans to get any nominee approved. But even if Democrats were able to request all the records they wanted, that still wouldn’t delay the confirmation hearings.

In fact, Grassley has scheduled the hearings to begin Sept. 4. He hasn’t changed the date even though the National Archives has informed him many of the records he requested himself won’t be ready until the end of October.

The White House must have known before Trump nominated Kavanaugh that he had an extensive record. Grassley is using that fact and a politically charged timeline to his advantage to avoid disclosing potentially controversial material about Kavanaugh.

Grassley says there's no point in reviewing all the records Democrats want access to about Kavanaugh because they're all going to vote against him anyway. But if that's the case, why review any records if all the Republicans have already decided to vote yes? This confirmation process is not only for all 100 senators but also for the public and their confidence in the court — and their elected officials.

The blizzard of documents Grassley is touting isn’t transparency. It’s a political whiteout.